On February, 3rd, 1959, 22 year old Buddy Holly, J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson and Ritchie Valens, aged 17, died in a plane crash shortly after take-off from Clear Lake, Iowa. All three were travelling to Fargo, North Dakota, for the next show on their Winter Dance Party Tour which Holly had set, covering 24 cities in three weeks, to make money after the break-up of his band, The Crickets, last year.
The bus they had originally planned to use developed heating problems, but Buddy was able to find a plane at the last minute.
Also on this day, in 1978 Holly's Lubbock, TX birth home is miraculously saved from demolition by its new owner, who had, a few days prior, bought the house scheduled to be demolished on this very day. Neither the city nor the new resident had any idea of the home's significance.
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Don McLean: "For some reason I wanted to write a big song about America and about politics, but I wanted to do it in a different way. As I was fiddling around, I started singing this thing about the Buddy Holly crash, the thing that came out (singing), 'Long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.'
"I thought, Whoa, what's that? And then the day the music died, it just came out. And I said, Oh, that is such a great idea. And so that's all I had. And then I thought, I can't have another slow song on this record. I've got to speed this up. I came up with this chorus, crazy chorus. And then one time about a month later I just woke up and wrote the other five verses. Because I realized what it was, I knew what I had. And basically, all I had to do was speed up the slow verse with the chorus and then slow down the last verse so it was like the first verse, and then tell the story, which was a dream. It is from all these fantasies, all these memories that I made personal. Buddy Holly's death to me was a personal tragedy. As a child, a 15-year-old, I had no idea that nobody else felt that way much. I mean, I went to school and mentioned it and they said, 'So what?' So I carried this yearning and longing, if you will, this weird sadness that would overtake me when I would look at this album, The Buddy Holly Story, because that was my last Buddy record before he passed away."
In whole and in parts, this song carries deep and heartfelt memories to many, including me. One of the great songs of all-time.
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